Badlands News Brief
Change of Batter, Indeed ...
The News Cycle is almost impossible to track these days. At least, to do so fully.
That’s where we come in.
In the Badlands News Brief, the Badlands Media team hand pick news items of interest from the previous days to give you an overview of the biggest goings-on relevant to the Truth Community with some Badlands flavoring to help wash it down.
This week’s items are brought to you by our friends at A Bit of Whimsy Boutique. Please support the America First sponsors who make this work possible.
Now, onto the news from the Weekend that Was …
Democrats promise ‘orderly process’ to replace Biden, Harris vows to ‘earn and win’ party nomination
President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race for the White House on Sunday, ending his bid for reelection following a disastrous debate with Donald Trump that raised doubts about his fitness for office just four months before the election.
Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris is being thrust into the most scrutinizing of spotlights, suddenly the leading candidate to succeed Biden as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and her party’s main hope of defeating Trump.
Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the U.S. presidential race injects greater uncertainty into the world at a time when Western leaders are grappling with wars in Ukraine and Gaza, a more assertive China in Asia and the rise of the far-right in Europe.
During a five-decade career in politics, Biden developed extensive personal relationships with multiple foreign leaders that none of the potential replacements on the Democratic ticket can match. After his announcement, messages of support and gratitude for his years of service poured in from near and far.
The scope of foreign policy challenges facing the next U.S. president makes clear how consequential what happens in Washington is for the rest of the planet. — AP News
Our Take: Like Burning Bright said: this is a war of stories. Always has been.
As Patrick noted on Saturday's DPH, for quite some time, I've been saying that Hillary Clinton is the villain that this story deserves; most recently after the Trump-Biden debate, when the panicked speculation that Biden was unfit among the MSM mockingbirds reached a fever pitch.
As I hashed out on the following week's Badlands Daily, I saw the storyline unfolding in one of two ways: either the election would be stolen from Trump (As Jon and the DPH have discussed at length) in order to trigger the public mandate for election integrity and retribution against the Deep State, in which it makes sense to keep Biden in the race, for obvious reasons; or, Trump will win the election, in which case it makes sense to swap in a more formidable foe that is worthy of the high-stakes moment.
I'm not now suggesting that Biden's resignation means the latter—we still don't know who the candidate will actually be, or if they'll even be an election at all. And we could always get that "change of batter," and still see the election stolen in an absurd manner that results in that same public mandate for resolution.
With all of that said, the arch-villain of the "Ballad of Donald Trump" has always been Hillary Clinton. Now that Biden has actually resigned, many people are making this same distinction, and for obvious reasons. This whole saga began with Hillary Clinton, and it would follow the conventions of both story-telling and "Ballad" style poetry to have the final stanza be a refrain of an earlier verse.
Though, I'd like to now introduce one more wrinkle to my theory—and this is more fun, though quite earnest, analysis—but I found myself very amused and fixated on the line-up of speakers they scheduled for the final day of the RNC Convention last Thursday. From a "comms" standpoint, having Linda McMahon and Terry Bollea speak within hours of one another did not seem like a coincidence. While it is true that most of the speakers from Thursday had connections to the world of combat sports, those two in particularl seemed to deliver specific messages.
First, we had Linda McMahon—wife of WWE/WWF founder Vince McMahon, and former president and CEO of that organization—talking about how Donald Trump, "for fun," joined the "most compelling and highest-rated storylines in the [World Wrestling Entertainment's] history." She also revealed that she served in Trump's cabinet running the Small Business Administration—highlighting Trump's continued connection to the McMahons and professional wrestling.
It is worth noting that Trump was also inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2013, and the short speech he gave was loaded with tidbits that are very difficult, in hindsight, to overlook. Take a listen:
First he notes that his relationship with the McMahons and WWE began in Atlantic City at WrestleMania #4, which was held in 1988 at Trump Plaza. (This connects to Just Human’s research into Trump's time working as a informant for the FBI, which we won't get into here.) Even more strange is that this particular WrestleMania was the very first event where a battle royal elimination tournament was held, where 14 wrestlers competed in a single giant fight for one title, and the winner was Hulk Hogan's rival-turned-future-partner, Macho Man Randy Savage. (Also, did you catch Trump's line about his fight with McMahon—"The Battle of the Billionaires?" Foreshadowing?)
What also happened in 1988?
Donald Trump attended the RNC Convention for the first time ever, revealing that he was a conservative to Larry King, but he was also asked whether he would accept the Vice-Presidential nomination from George Bush, if called upon. He was further pressed about running for president, and explicitly denied being an establishment Republican, saying that he sided with the working class.
Wow.
In his 2013 HOF induction speech, Trump says he met the "largest man he's ever met," referring to Andre the Giant, who headlined the event in a fight against Hulk Hogan—who spoke just an hour before Trump took the stage last Thursday. The Hulkster demonstrated "kayfabe" by breaking in and out of his iconic character, one minute flexing as he ripped his shirt off—revealing a "Trump/Vance 2024" tank top underneath—the next minute reintroducing himself to the audience as Terry Bollea, calmly explaining his longtime friendship with Trump.
Terry then broke back into character, using the "Trumpmania" to describe the aura surrounding Trump, and "Trumpmaniacs" to describe the MAGA faithful.
Are we about to witness Trumpmania 2024? A battle royale elimination tournament to see who will get to face off against Trump? Would it surprise any of you to learn that Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson claimed last November that he has been asked "by both parties" to run for POTUS? The Rock? Perhaps the most infamous "heel" character in the history of the WWE? (Did you catch in Trump's 2013 HOF speech where he eased into his "Heel" character? And the audience booed him? Foreshadowing?)
Do you believe in Ghosts, yet? Can you smell what The Rock is cooking? — GhostofBasedPatrickHenry
Another Take:
This feels like where it's all heading.
None of it has to make sense on an Actual-Process level, but from a storytelling level, we're going full circle.
The rematch Americans have been waiting for.
Trump used Clinton as his first cypher to expose the Deep State to the American people. He then spent his entire first admin proving that by absorbing all the slings and arrows the establishment machine could throw at him, only for the Biden Admin to triple down on drawing a clear line of demarcation between [them] and us.
The only way to undo generations of Trauma-Paralysis programming is through Trauma-Catharsis programming.
This will end how it began.
Reruns are the name of the game, not because they're tired or rote, but because, when the American people see the same movie again, they're going to be seeing it with new eyes, and through new lensing.
You can either doom out or try to enjoy the show, and appreciate that we were told, directionally, how it was going to play out.
The Old Guard tried and failed to remove Donald Trump.
The Old Guard succeeded in removing Joe Biden.
The Old Guard is on full display.
That wasn’t their original plan.
Control comes in many forms.
He fought valiantly … #OurBoyBlue will be remembered. — Burning Bright
A global tech outage brought many computer systems and businesses to a screeching halt.
A global software outage Friday brought many computer systems across business, healthcare, technology and government sectors to a screeching halt in under 12 hours.
How did the crash unfold? Which systems have recovered, and which ones are still affected? We break it down. (All times Eastern Time.)
Late Thursday night and early Friday, 911 centers and transportation services are disrupted
Between 6 and 7 a.m., the White House investigates and global banks report issues
Between 8 and 9 a.m., some flights resume but airports brace for a busy day
Between 9 a.m. and noon, federal agencies get involved and Biden is briefed
Late morning through early afternoon: canceled doctors and DMV appointments
Late afternoon sees more medical disruptions
Saturday morning: massive flight delays — CNN
Our Take: On Friday’s Liberty Den, we discussed the layers of kayfabe within our reality. I don’t usually use that word, but after Hulk Hogan tore his shirt off at the RNCC, I’m significantly more comfortable with the concept.
Anyway, it’s hard to believe that this Crowdstrike thing is an organic occurrence, that a whoopsie happened and people couldn’t open their fridges or catch their flights.
It wasn’t a whoopsie. It was a massive red pill on at least two important fronts:
(1) Smart devices and data.
I don’t know anyone personally that couldn’t open their fridge, but there were reports on social media that smart fridges were locked shut due to the outage.
If true, is there a greater red pill than an IT outage cutting off your food access?
(2) Elections.
Everyone knows that electronic voting equipment is connected to the internet, as we’ve repeatedly shown on Why We Vote. Those who are still believing the narrative on “air gapped machines” — seriously, LOL — received a loading dose of reality last week.
Kayfabe is intended to entertain and elicit certain reactions from the audience, right?
Brilliant.
On smart devices generally, whether it’s your fridge or your doorbell or your thermostat or Alexa, is the convenience of smart devices worth the trade-offs? Think government-mandated caps on your thermostat or a locked fridge during an outage.
Is the convenience worth the risks? Think social credit score.
More people are now asking those questions as a result of this Crowdstrike thing.
Good morning, sleepyheads! — Ashe in America
Another Take: Some quick-hit thoughts on the global Crowdstrike outage, which is managing to converge narratives from the mystery of the DoD IP addresses & Elon Musk to Bitcoin:
1) The company is infamous in the Truth Community for the role it did or did not play in the 2020 election.
2) The major topic of conversation worldwide is whether or not said outage was the result of a cyber attack (MSM reports deny this.)
3) Well, I'll just let WAPO do the talking:
"While the world was distracted with President Donald Trump leaving office on Jan. 20, an obscure Florida company discreetly announced to the world’s computer networks a startling development: It now was managing a huge unused swath of the Internet that, for several decades, had been owned by the U.S. military."
4) The topic of cyber security is now a mainstream talking point, with Elon Musk's StarLink in the spotlight (again ... think DoD.)
5) Re: Decentralization, the Bitcoin network was completely unaffected, unlike banking networks. — Burning Bright
Secret Service said to have denied requests for more security at Trump events
Top officials at the U.S. Secret Service repeatedly denied requests for additional resources and personnel sought by Donald Trump’s security detail in the two years leading up to his attempted assassination at a rally in Pennsylvania last Saturday, according to four people familiar with the requests.
Agents charged with protecting the former president requested magnetometers and more agents to screen attendees at sporting events and other large public gatherings Trump attended, as well as additional snipers and specialty teams at other outdoor events, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive security discussions. The requests, which have not been previously reported, were sometimes denied by senior officials at the agency, who cited various reasons, including a lack of resources at an agency that has long struggled with staffing shortages, they said.
Those rejections — in response to requests that were several times made in writing — led to long-standing tensions that pitted Trump, his top aides and his security detail against Secret Service leadership, as Trump advisers privately fretted that the vaunted security agency was not doing enough to protect the former president.
The Secret Service, after initially denying turning down requests for additional security, is now acknowledging some may have been rejected. The revelation comes as agency veterans say the organization has been forced to make difficult decisions amid competing demands, a growing list of protectees and limited funding. — WAPO
Our Take: The sharks are circling—the tiger sharks, I mean—and by that I mean anons, because The Boss just chummed the waters.
Trump is a master of narrative and storytelling, but most of all, he is the master at using his proverbial laser-pointer to mark the targets that he wants anons to dissect.
It looks like we have our next target, and he wants us to dig in and expose their lies.
Follow the money. Follow the lies. Find the contradictions.
Time to work for The Boss. Don't focus on defining a specific storyline, or establishing a consensus. Focus on exposing the lies.
Happy Hunting. — GhostofBasedPatrickHenry
Trump and Zelenskyy hold phone call — and Ukraine says it liked what it heard
Former President Donald Trump spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday for the first time since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and unlike their last controversial phone call, both sides claimed to be satisfied with how the conversation went.
Trump said that it was a “very good call” and that he will work to negotiate a peace deal between Moscow and Kyiv. A person close to Zelenskyy who requested anonymity to discuss the private conversation said it went “exceedingly well” and that Trump pledged to “achieve a just peace in Ukraine” if he wins back the White House.
Zelenskyy wrote in a post on X that he and Trump agreed to schedule a “personal meeting” to discuss “what steps can make peace fair and truly lasting.”
Trump has pledged to swiftly end the war in Ukraine if reelected in November, going so far as to state he would negotiate peace before he assumes office in January, and has disparagingly called Zelenskyy “the greatest salesman of all time” for his efforts to secure billions of dollars in military, economic and humanitarian aid from Washington.
The war in Ukraine was not a major topic of discussion at the Republican National Convention this week in Milwaukee, though as Trump accepted the Republican nomination on Thursday night, he boasted that “I will end every single international crisis that the current administration has created, including the horrible war with Russia and Ukraine, which would have never happened if I was president.”
The conversation came just a few days shy of the five-year anniversary of the phone call between the two leaders that led to Trump’s first impeachment, after he asked Zelenskyy to consider investigating Joe Biden on discredited allegations. — Politico
Our Take: It takes two to make a perfect phone call.
When I continue to claim Zelenskyy is "Our Guy," I'm not suggesting he's been that way from the start, but framing him as a Judas goat in the Ukrainian Nazi recycling program makes the whole picture come clear.
Zelenskyy is an actor. Literally.
He was propped up by Ukrainian Oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi in order to be the Ukrainian version of Barack Obama, through which proxy war would continue to be waged with Russia.
The thing is, when you're a career puppet, your strings can be cut ... or they can be transferred.
For the last two years, Zelenskyy has had three specialties:
1) Humiliating the Globalist hegemon on the world stage.
2) Losing Deep State money & weapons.
3) Sending Nazis to their deaths in the Donbas against Russian Maneuver Defense while holding Ukrainian soldiers in reserve.
And now both he and Trump are posturing for him to sign the original peace deal Vladimir Putin offered in March 2022.
Control comes in many forms. — Burning Bright
Trump potentially declaring Bitcoin a strategic reserve asset seen as a ‘watershed moment’
Former US president and current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump could announce Bitcoin as a “strategic reserve asset” during a crypto conference in Nashville later this month, according to rumors on social media.
Trump is widely expected to speak at the upcoming Bitcoin conference in Nashville, which will take place later this month.
Dennis Porter, co-founder and CEO of the Satoshi Action Fund, said he got this information from “credible” sources.
“Adding #Bitcoin as a ‘strategic reserve’ to the US Treasury is a no brainer and once the USA does it, the paradigm will shift and the world will understand they must also have a #Bitcoin position,” he wrote on X. — Investing.com
Our Take: With Bitcoin pumping over the weekend in the wake of the Crowdstrike fiasco, we’re on deck for a wide-ranging orange pill.
I'm not suggesting we're going to get a $100k God candle anytime soon, although I think it's entirely possible and (in the longer term) inevitable. BUT, the fact that most people who haven't put the time or effort into researching the world's foremost decentralized technology believe it can just be "shut off" are going to be dealing with some cognitive dissonance every time the global banking, investing and cyber security system of systems is threatened as cyber doom mongering ramps up heading toward November … all while the Bitcoin network remains safe, reliable, and “on.”
(Remember, this is likely the Deep State planting the seeds for an election steal via a false flag cyber attack.)
What's more, Trump speaks at the Bitcoin conference in Nashville in just a few days, where he COULD announce a US BTC Strategic Reserve, which is coming on the heels of him referencing Bitcoin and BTC Mining as a matter of Nat Sec.
Timing. — Burning Bright
BONUS ITEMS
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee dead at 74
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), who served in Congress for nearly three decades, has died at the age of 74, her family announced Friday evening.
“Today, with incredible grief for our loss yet deep gratitude for the life she shared with us, we announce the passing of United States Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of the 18th Congressional District of Texas,” her family wrote in a statement shared to her account on X.
Her family did not specify a cause of death, but the news comes just over one month after the Congresswoman revealed that she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was undergoing treatment.
Jackson Lee was first elected to the House in 1994, besting then-incumbent Rep. Craig Washington (D-Texas) in the Democratic primary. She went on to defeat her Republican opponent in the general election, beginning her almost 30-year tenure in the House.
The Congresswoman served on the House Judiciary, Homeland Security and Budget Committees.
“A local, national, and international humanitarian, she was acknowledged worldwide for her courageous fights for racial justice, criminal justice, and human rights, with a special emphasis on women and children,” Jackson Lee’s family wrote in their statement Friday evening.
“Her legislative victories impacted millions, from establishing the Juneteenth Federal Holiday to reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act,” they added. — The Hill
‘Would create a perverse incentive’: DOJ again opposes release of ‘properly withheld’ Joe Biden audiotapes by warning of ‘deepfakes’, ‘privacy harms’ to uncharged individual
The U.S. Department of Justice on Thursday told a federal judge that combined efforts by two conservative groups and a coalition of mainstream media organizations to obtain “properly withheld” audiotapes of President Joe Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit should fail for numerous reasons, including that the threat of “deepfakes” and “privacy harms” to an uncharged individual are real and that forcing disclosure “would create a perverse incentive” against executive branch cooperation with Congress.
On the one hand, DOJ disputed that there is “any meaningful countervailing public benefit” to disclose the recordings given that a transcript of the interview was released and Hur testified before Congress about his report and non-charging recommendation for willful retainment and disclosure of “classified materials,” but on the other hand DOJ acknowledged that the the audiotapes contain “new information not contained in the written transcript,” namely the “sound, tone, and pacing” of Biden’s answers (i.e., the “non-lexical aspects” of the tapes). — Law and Crime
BlueAnon Watch: One-Third Of Democrats Believe Trump Faked Assassination Attempt As Conspiracy Theory Goes Mainstream
At the height of the "QAnon" fervor in 2021 - roughly 23% of Republicans said they believed the theory that Donald Trump is fighting a cabal of satanic, sex-trafficking pedophiles.
On Monday, a Morning Consult poll found that 34% of Democrats think Trump faked his own assassination attempt last Saturday. Such left-wing conspiracy theorists have been referred to as "BlueAnon," and as the Washington Free Beacon reports, this particular notion - that Trump faked the assassination attempt - originated with Democratic powerbroker Dmitri Mehlhorn, who has made at least 10 visits to the Biden White House.
Hours after the shooting on Saturday, Mehlhorn - and adviser to LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman (who joked about assassinating Trump the week before the attempt) - sent a memo to reports suggesting they portray the shooting as a false-flag operation directly from Vladimir Putin's playbook, designed to give Trump an iconic photo-op.
"This is a classic Russian tactic, such as when Putin killed 300 civilians in 1999 and blamed it on terrorists to ride the backlash to winning power," wrote Melhorn, who failed to address numerous photos - such as the one showing a bullet whizzing past Trump's head, the obvious bullet wound across Trump's right ear, or the death of a rally attendee - Corey Comperatore, who was shot while shielding his family from bullets. — ZeroHedge
We hope you enjoyed this brief look back at the major news items you might have missed in this ever-escalating and ever-accelerating news cycle as the Information War continues to rage on around us.
As always, if you have any thoughts on these news items or the MANY others swirling in the digital ether, drop into the comments below to share them with your fellow Badlanders.
Badlands Media will always put out our content for free, but you can support us by becoming a paid subscriber to this newsletter. Help our collective of citizen journalists take back the narrative from the MSM. We are the news now.
In my own life, (as of last week), “conspiracy theory talk” is no longer taboo. Yesterday at church, and with my extended family, people were saying things that prove to me that the exposure op is producing some optimal “net effects.” 😊😊😊
About the Crowdstrike "snafu" I am not convinced that it was a software update that caused the disruption. I have a deep down gut feeling that it was the ghosts in the machine unrigging the election! There are some reports saying that an enemy cyber attack threat was detected. The only enemy of the deep state controlled Crowdstrike would be the good guys. Did our guys get into Crowdstrike's system and make sure they are not able to rig the election?
EDIT: I just had another thought...what if Crowdstrike knew ahead of time that Biden was going to drop out and they needed to take their own system down to cancel out all the fake Biden votes they had already injected into their system? This would be their system update.